Quantcast’s New Marketing and Communications Chief Sees AI as the Next Big Frontier for Brands

Industry vet Steven Wolfe Pereira leaves Neustar to join firm

Quantcast has hired Steven Wolfe Pereira as its chief marketing and communications officer.

The firm specializes in artificial intelligence, and Wolfe Pereira will develop and lead Quantcast’s brand, corporate and product marketing as well as design, user experience and product while also joining Quantcast’s executive leadership team. Additionally, he will work on creating new solutions that help marketers leverage data and insights.

Steven Wolfe Periera

“What is going to be the most important technology in the 21st century is going to be artificial intelligence—it will be as big, if not bigger, than the internet itself,” Wolfe Pereira said. “AI is going to fundamentally transform every single brand, company [and] industry.”

Wolfe Pereira will report to Quantcast’s CEO and co-founder Konrad Feldman starting Monday and will work out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Wolfe Pereira held the same title at Neustar since April 2016 and has also worked at Datalogix, Starcom Mediavest Group and Univision Communications.

“If there’s anything I can do to add value to the industry or a company, I think I’m good at identifying a trend, packaging it and telling that story in an accessible way, because I understand the technical and creative sides,” he said.

Quantcast is primarily known for providing advertising and audience stats with its AI-powered platform to publishers and brands. When asked if brands understand all of the facets of AI, Wolfe Pereira said, “AI is now a buzzword, but it is so deep and profound that people do not understand what AI truly means. The last time that a human beat a machine at chess was 20 years ago when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, and advertising is orders of magnitude more complex than chess.”

While a lot of companies are pitching AI as a way to automate advertising and use deep troves of data, Wolfe Pereira pointed out that two Stanford professors were early advisors to Quantcast and that the company has invested more than $250 million in research and development specific to AI.

“Programmatic is not AI—AI is an extremely profound field, and it’s all about statistics,” he said. “When you think about what is machine learning, it’s all the faster hardware tied with massive data sets that are available on the internet and you apply software to it.”